I miss mervTormel!
 

This is NOT a knock on the fine job being done by the new moderators, Yellow and Hayne: long before they gained moderator status, time and time again, they each showed the qualities needed to fulfill the roles they now have.

But still, after nearly two months, I miss Merv. I would often scan threads on topics I wasn't even necessarily interested in if only to catch some of Merv's snappy reparté or to pick up some new turn of phrase that I'd never heard before. If it wasn't for Merv, I'd still be getting "foo" all over my "bar" (or worse!) and I wouldn't be using the word "granularity" with such frequency. Because of Merv, I am a much better trouble-shooter than I would have been without his guidance.

I hoped that his retirement from moderating would not translate into total absence from this forum, but sadly he's not been back since. I hope you are doing well wherever you are, Merv!

I suspect he still sneaks in to lurk, though he may not look like the mT of old. I definitely miss his expertise and expansive vocabulary as well!

We all miss him.

I tried to read every post (that was gigantic) of his just to learn, even when I was buried in the Unix. And I'll never forget a long 3:00am exchange solving some screwy 10.2 problem I was having.

The Wallace Stevens of Geekdom...learned many verbs I never knew existed from merv (although I'm still not sure what the hell half of them really mean). More importantly, merv patiently helped with my first attempts to understand what unix was about without making me feel like a complete idiot (many thanks to hayne and yellow in this regard also) and had me laughing in the process. Yep, I miss him too.

I think we all agree.. but does anyone know exactly why he can't be a part of the forums anymore? Is he forever now in a place with no internet connection?? More realistically, did he just decide the forums was taking up too much of his time (which seems to happen to me :))?

But anyways, yellow and hayne keep up the great work!

It's a condition of his current employment. That's about all I can say about it since we don't want to cause him any grief.

I think he's in a position to help an even broader portion of the Mac community now, though. :D

I received a kind note from Merv yesterday that confirms what Craig just posted.

.
....a few MervTormel "Classics":



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the opaqueness is subtle and often difficult to diagnose without previous experience experiencing it.

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vance= ah, sed, the one program i have yet to learn!

merv= one doesn't learn sed. one pokes a stick at it.

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does anyone besides me and Grace Mary Hopper think applescript looks like cobol?

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take those out and let her buck!

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i find that most progamming is error handling and reducing to subatomic particles, the problem, and reconstructing it piece by piece, considering all the possibilities, then dealing with the last one hundred gotchas as other users mash into it.

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well, you haven't stated what your objectives are in this endeavor.

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items in the trash don't have full paths from where they originate, a heinous flaw, IMHO.

a good trasher would use ditto and replicate the entire source tree in the bit-bucket

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drink deeply from the toilet of truth

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what shell? tcsh? hmm, try a sh subshell, if that works and tcsh still don't, then some bizarre, Orwellian, Byzantine, Draconian quoting nonsense is required. avoid tcsh :-)

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loosing fingerprints over changing file modes? want to save about a hundred thousand keystrokes a day? worried about the FBI dusting your keys?

introducing zModeWhacker, the only file mode changing script you will ever need! fully extendable! *(editor not included)

it slices, it dices, no salesman will visit your door! special offer! four-for-one!

here's a handy little script that can free up your time so you can clean your eHouse!

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try again, very meticulously. check each intermediary value for sanity.

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it will stomp your code and you'll have to retro-fit your changes into their new code. these are doable things, but not very interesting after you've done about a thousand of them.

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i can suggest a way to get you back to square one-minus-point-oh-eight-niner.

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i would benefit from your suggested topic as it would cause me to explore other avenues that i have otherwise put off until the fatter fish are fried. as a lot of the posts here do. explore, that is.

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cp fstab.work to fstab - sacrifice a goat, pray... oh, and backup first.

anyhow, research all that, stuff it in there, reboot and run for the hills.

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be prepared for whinging users calling in the middle of the night to b17ch at you because a friend sent them porno in an email and they hit their quota wall. several such users soon discover my double-secret file compressor:

% rm -rf /Users/whingingSh17heel

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spell it all out so that there is less confusion in the future when you examine your creation wondering what you were thinking.

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Merv, really missing you here!
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ROFLMAO! :D

Merv, you da man.

ha! i made the list! :) cheers to merv!

it's very weird that this post pops up today. i was literally just thinking about some of merv's posts a few days ago. how odd... and what a missed presence!

I've been thinking about him lately too and I'm glad to see this thread here. One of my favorite merv responses:
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hmm, that rig should be good for it. i don't think you'd have any other operational problems.

fsck it, drive on.
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and one about mail being delivered:
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but, since the message is delivered, i say, friggit, drive on. warnings are like traffic signs. they're just suggestions and can be ignored (sometimes).
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Warm wishes to you.

Good People,

mT asked me to relate the following:

"i almost choked on my coffee when i saw this 'obit'. i am honored and offended by this obvious attempt to inculcate my involvement in any of their improvement. their duplicitous behavior will prove their undoing."

After convincing him that this was not related to the pending federal charges against his person, and asking him to reflect on his involvement in this forum, he repied:

"oh, that wasn't me."

He denies making many of the posts attributed to him, claiming, "someone used sendmail as a vector to compromise my root account!"

Valid and Dubious, he will remain.

Lois ... strange things are afoot at the Circle-K

(ok, i'm mixing movies)

and we would expect nothing less. erm, well, you can pass that on...

:D
This thread brought me out of hiatus...
Here's to merv:
pfft... clink... cheers...

Another memo I didn't get...
 

... but I would like merv to know that on my Mac, 'mt' accesses the following LaunchBar search template:

I don't really miss him as much as you all but I did learn more from him than I did from most anyone about qualifying my questions and the steps already taken etc. Not to mention he "moved" like 15 of my posts because I always posted in the wrong room.

I think I remember him once telling me to stay in the coat room until I learn what I am doing, LMAO :D

Sure its funny now but...Yeah, I still don't miss him lol :D

that's pretty funny Xd ... if you can find the post, link it up -- it might be enjoyable to read!

If my memory serves me correctly I think it was a private message. I was so new I think he was trying to teach me to be specific and look for answers myself because I was posting like crazy, typical noob stuff. If I stumble on to it I will drop the link but I think it was an email or private message. I remember laughing about it a little later, like 6 months later. lol